I would love to tell everyone reading this, especially my fellow Filipinos, that Tony Gilroy's Bourne franchise sequel/spinoff, The Bourne Legacy, the last act of which takes place in Metro Manila, is a worthy addition to the franchise. Unfortunately, that simply isn't the case.
Understand, The Bourne Legacy is not what I consider a terrible movie; it's not even necessarily a bad one, but it comes in the wake of three movies with quality that ranged, in my opinion, from very good to excellent. The Bourne trilogy is one of those rare cinematic animals that got better as it went along, with each new movie in the trilogy getting better reviews and earning bigger box-office bucks, in the United States and everywhere else, as it went along. They were all taut, intelligent thrillers, even though all three of them followed distinctive story beats (several fist-fights, including one with an enhanced agent, at least one car chase, and a final confrontation, all laced with shadowy political intrigue) with The Bourne Ultimatum, in particular, providing such spectacular entertainment that, even today, I can watch it over and over again. Those three movies are among my very favorites in my DVD collection. Not only that, but they ended on an absolutely perfect note, much like the Indiana Jones trilogy before a fourth, entirely superfluous film was tacked onto the franchise. All loose ends were tied up and Matt Damon's Jason Bourne basically came full circle.
Ironically enough it was because the first three Bourne movies worked so well, individually and taken together, as a single, cohesive narrative, that it was actually more sensible to take the story, if it had to continue at all, in a new direction. The spinoff, had it been handled properly, could actually have captured a good deal of what made the trilogy as compelling as it was. From a storytelling point of view, this is actually what director/screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who wrote all three of the first three movies, has attempted, and I must credit him for that, but he seriously fumbles the execution.
The film begins at around the same time the last film ended, with Jason Bourne's expose of the government's enhanced-assassin programs threatening a whole lot of people in high places, prompting Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Ezra Kramer (Scott Glenn) to pay a visit to Admiral Mark Turso (Stacy Keach) regarding the problem. Turso then approaches Colonel Eric Byer (Edward Norton), who is overseeing the latest iteration of this program, dubbed Outcome, which involves chemically-enhanced agents.
One such agent, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), meanwhile is thousands of kilometers away, at a training ground in the Alaskan wilderness. He is constantly popping green and blue pills which, we later learn, are critical not only to his physical and mental enhancements, but to his ability to function. When he runs low , he looks up another agent in the field, known only as Number Three (Oscar Isaac) and stays for a while in the same cabin where he's holed up.
Meanwhile, the shady government types decide to close down the Outcome program altogether, which involves giving the chemically dependent operatives out in the field a yellow pill that takes them out, sending a drone to dispose of Number Three and Cross (which in the case of the latter doesn't quite take), and killing the scientists responsible for the chemical process of enhancement, one of whom is Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz). Fortunately for Shearing, Cross reaches her in time to save her from the spooks out to kill her. Shearing needs Cross to stay alive, and Cross needs Shearing's expertise, which could be the key to getting him off his "chems" once and for all. Of course, Turso and Byer will do everything in their power to make sure that they do not reach their destination, or any other for that matter.
The film's single biggest problem is its pacing; at two hours and fifteen minutes it feels half an hour too long, especially considering how much of that running time is devoted to some laborious exposition. There are action scenes aplenty, and quite impressively staged at that, but Gilroy simply fails to build tension in the first half of the film, something his predecessors Doug Liman, who directed the first film, and Paul Greengrass, who directed the second and third ones, did quite handily. Gilroy devotes in inordinate amount of time to explaining everything, apparently forgetting one of the cardinal rules of storytelling: show, not tell.
The exchanges between Cross and Number Three, for example, feel like they could have been at least five minutes shorter. There seems a vague attempt on Gilroy's part to suggest tension between the two of them, like they could erupt into a fight to the death at any moment, but to my mind Gilroy simply doesn't pull it off. Cross could have been sitting in Number Three's cabin by himself, looking for the much-needed "chems" and it would have had the same effect.
The most egregious lapses in narrative judgment, however, involve the "command center" moments featuring Turso, Byer and their team. Each and every film in the series has had such "command center" scenes, first involving Chris Cooper's Alexander Conklin, then later involving Joan Allen's Pamela Landy and David Strathairn's Noah Vosen, and all of them involved terrific amounts of tension even if it was basically just people in a room talking. For some reason, even though he's actually recreated scenes from The Bourne Ultimatum, Gilroy is unable to replicate with any real conviction the excitement of these moments. The dialogue about the horrible repercussions of Jason Bourne's actions seems, quite honestly, interminable, and as capable an actor as Edward Norton is, even he can't mask the fact that Gilroy's endlessly expository dialogue slows the film down to a snail's pace. It was astonishing to see how Gilroy could incorporate some of the most exciting scenes from the last film, including the death of a pivotal character, and still come up with something as boring as many of his scenes were to me. I was thoroughly perplexed by the fact that Gilroy made so much of the narrative of this film dependent on the events of the previous films, but was unable to transmit any of the thrills from those films to this one. Not only that, but each and every one of the previous Bourne films could stand on its own as well as being part of a bigger storytelling tapestry. This film is deliberately, infuriatingly written as something incomplete; it requires both a working knowledge of what has come before and leaves a great deal hanging, even after the more than two hours of running time are over.
The painful irony at work here is that one of the few memorable lines from the film, Turso's utterance, "I gave you a Ferrari and you treated it like a lawnmower," is the perfect way to describe Gilroy's script in relation to the rest of the franchise, especially the last film.
The good news is that when the action begins in earnest, it pretty much does not stop. The film's first major action sequence pits Cross against a drone and a wolf, but for me, it's only when he unleashes his fighting skills and smarts against a team of black-ops agents that the action really begins. Accomplished second unit director/stunt guru Dan Bradley and his various stunt crew members truly deliver the goods, especially when the action shifts to Manila. There's a rooftop chase to rival the one that took place in Tangiers in the last film, and a motorcycle chase that's easily on par with any of the other car chases that have featured in the series so far, though it ends on a bit of an anticlimactic note and with some pretty silly-looking computer-generated imagery (CGI).
I should make clear that I don't have any beef with Jeremy Renner taking over this franchise, and to be frank his performance was the only thing that made this film worth watching while I was waiting for the action to actually start. Rachel Weisz makes a welcome addition to the series as well, though now that she's actually performed what was needed of her I can't help but wonder, somewhat cynically, how much longer her character will last in future films, should there be any. Edward Norton does the best he can with a poorly-scripted role, but if nothing else he sets himself up to be a primo bad guy in future installments. Stacy Keach looks imposing, but his Turso isn't nearly as engaging a bad guy as Cooper's Conklin, Brian Cox's Ward Abbott of the second film, or Strathairn's Vosen were.
I should also point out that Metro Manila, in all its overcrowded, grimy glory, is not to blame for Tony Gilroy's shortcomings; to me it is more alive than any of the cities that came before it, where people were, by and large, just part of the background. The Filipino actors led by John Arcilla, Lou Veloso and Cecilia Montes really threw themselves into their brief but fairly substantial roles (Arcilla's in particular) and it filled me with pride to watch them strut their stuff for what I'm sure will be a wider audience than any of them have ever known.
For all of my love for my home country, I cannot for the life of me give this movie the ringing endorsement I would have wanted to because frankly the scenes that do not take place in the Philippines are, by and large, rather laborious to sit through.
Given that he wrote all three of this film's predecessors, Tony Gilroy's huge role in making the first three Bourne movies as riveting as they were cannot be denied, but now that he has occupied the director's chair as well it has become clear to me that the series needs the sure-handed direction of someone who knows when it's time to focus on dialogue and when it's time to focus on adrenaline-pumping action. Now that he's gotten all of the lengthy explanation of the Outcome program out of the way, maybe Gilroy can craft a script that hews more closely to the brilliantly-paced stories of the first three films, and maybe he can hire a decent action director while he's at it. To be honest I wouldn't mind if Dan Bradley took over next time.
3/5
